Well it's also a governance problem exacerbated by gerrymandering that overly favors incumbents, term limits that guarantee that greenhorns are perpetually in office and by the time a lawmaker is worth a damned they are termed out, as well as governance by proposition which guarantees there is no coherent plan for the future let alone one to deal with the present. Add to that the fact that so many people are on the public dole from welfare to bloated pensions where retired prison guards for example can draw up to 80% of their salary yearly until they die so if they retire at 50 and live until 100 guess what?
Kimmer
I doubt any of us are fundamentally disagreeing. "Our" politicians have
messed things up, and have done so over and over again ("over" having the
additional meaning here of compounding the problems). They have as a group
"governed" by a short-sighted view of "show me the money".
The jurisdiction in an East Coast state where I once served had a nearly
brand-new apartment complex which was built with no insulation and
light-weight wood-truss roofs with a common attic. (To this day, the FD
won't mount an interior attack [potential for the building collapsing on the
FFs] and two buildings have burned to the ground in the last five years.)
That community also had the world's only unprotected wood frame enclosed
shopping mall!
Problem was, the local government was of the mindset that "restrictive"
building codes would repel the money. (Actually, the LACK of proper codes
repelled the money. Those garden apartments eventually became a slum, which
also increased the cost of emergency services.)
When Boston, MA, put in restrictive codes, Chelsea didn't, and all the
unsafe industry moved to Chelsea. A rag shop caught fire on a Sunday (14 Oct
1973) and ultimately half the city burned down. Hint: When half your tax
base has burned to the ground, the check ain't in the mail.
Our politicians, no wiser for the lessons they could have learned from
history, are doing the same thing now: Get the money in, and spend it, and
damn the taxpayers so long as we get to stay in office.
Ultimately, the problem always comes back to us, the voter/taxpayers*: We
keep voting these idiots back into office! What are we nuts!?
Example of how bad this is: In 2009 and again in 2010, state budget cuts
forced school districts all over CA to cut their budgets, lay off teachers,
increase class sizes. Yet in the 2010 elections, the California Teachers
Association endorsed (and coerced their members to vote for) the very
legislators who'd caused these layoffs of their members!!!!!!!
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* Part of the problem, IMO, is that not enough voters are taxpayers. There
are a lot of votes among the urban poor, for example.
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